One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."

The economy has just about come to a standstill – not so much because credit markets are clogged as because there’s not enough demand in the economy to keep it going. Consumer spending has fallen off a cliff. Investment is drying up. And exports are dropping because the recession has now spread around the world.

So are we about to return to Keynesianism? Hopefully. Government is the spender of last resort, which means the new Obama administration should probably be considering a stimulus package in the range of $600 billion, roughly 4 percent of national product -- focused on building and repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, providing help to states to maintain services, and investing in new green technologies in order to wean the nation off oil.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The last eight years can best be described as the illegitimate rule of deviant forces bent on enriching the few at the expense of the many. Poverty is up, real income is flat for the majority of citizens while the elite have "super sized" their holdings with a callous disregard for the nation and economic realities.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

There is compelling new proof of a silver (and gold) price manipulation. The evidence connects the investment bank JP Morgan Chase, the dominant force in world commodity trading, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the primary commodity regulator, and the U.S. Treasury Department, the arranger of every conceivable...

Lost in the wake of Henry Paulson's announcement Wednesday that Treasury is "changing direction" in how it doles out money in the bank rescue plan is a little-noticed lawsuit filed last Friday by Bloomberg LP, the business news wire service. It is suing the Federal Reserve Board's governors for public records that would answer two simple questions: Who is receiving $2 trillion in Fed loans and what collateral are taxpayers getting to support them?

That's trillion, with a "t."

And, yes, as hard as it is to believe, taxpayers don't know the identity of the borrowers to whom they are lending. They also don't know what kind of junk - Stocks? Bonds? Three milk cows and a '69 Camaro? - they are getting to collateralize the federal loans.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Iceland’s economic collapse (see below) was due to most of the same forces that presently menace the U.S.: huge budget and trade deficits added to the “world banking crisis,” which comprises the attempted unwinding of a mega-Ponzi scheme (far larger than the sub-prime bubble) involving unregulated inter-bank insurance policies called Credit Default Swaps (CDS), which originally amounted to $45 TRILLION but which will rise to around $500 Trillion(!) when the unregulated trading in these CDS is taken into account:

Just the $45 Trillion alone is approximately equal to the Gross Domestic Products (GDP) of the entire world combined!

Meanwhile, the average American is in debt up to his/her keister, while Americans’ real wages are falling and jobs (particularly good ones) are rapidly drying up.Since 75% of the U.S. GDP derives from consumer spending (counting 5% due to residential home sales), it is inevitable that the U.S. GDP will now contract rapidly.When this contraction is recognized by the rest of the world as irreversible, there will be a rapid sell-off of dollars eventually crashing the greenback – exactly the same thing that just happened to the Icelandic krona.My guess is that the dollar will fall by at least 50% from its present value in the not-too-distant future and won’t bounce back in my lifetime.Consequently, those of us with incomes and savings denominated in American dollars will find the prices of imported goods (presently comprising most of our non-food purchases) to double overnight!

At least we Americans still have a safety net in Social Security, Medicare, U.S. Government pensions, and the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).Or do we?

In fact, the PGBC has exhausted its entire $8 billion surplus as a result of a series of big corporate bankruptcies last year: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jan2003/pens-j29.shtml ).Meanwhile, Henry Paulson (former Goldman Sachs top fox) is now giving away what’s left of our protective “chicken coop” to the very foxes responsible for the unfolding economic disaster!Moreover, he asserts that the government must now address Bush’s deficits by pursuing "policies that promote economic growth and fiscal responsibility, and address entitlement reform” – translation: cut our Social Security, Medicare, etc. (see below).

Quoting Naomi Klein (in last article below): “If this final looting is not stopped (and yes, there is still time), we can forget about Obama making good on the more progressive aspects of his campaign platform, let alone the hope that he will offer the country some kind of grand Green New Deal.”

What there is “still time” for us to do is to demand that Obama – and more immediately the damn Congress – stop the giveaway to the perps and instead inject that fraction of that $700 billion that is greater than what Warren Buffet would pay for the banks' shares directly into the economy, particularly for mortgage relief for those facing foreclosure and job creation in the areas of developing cheap non-polluting energy sources and other new green technologies and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure (for example, our interstate highways are in disrepair, our bridges are falling down, and our passenger trains are absolutely pathetic compared to the energy-efficient fast trains of Western Europe and Japan).

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — The collapse came so fast it seemed unreal, impossible. One woman here compared it to being hit by a train. Another said she felt as if she were watching it through a window. Another said, “It feels like you’ve been put in a prison, and you don’t know what you did wrong.”

This country, as modern and sophisticated as it is geographically isolated, still seems to be in shock. But if the events of last month — the failure of Iceland’s banks; the plummeting of its currency; the first wave of layoffs; the loss of reputation abroad — felt like a bad dream, Iceland has now awakened to find that it is all coming true. ...(Go to link above for more.)

The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride--a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return....(Go to link above for more.)

The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq — a "free-fraud zone" where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create

NAOMI KLEIN

RollingStone

Posted Nov 13, 2008 12:00 AM (amended to reflect developments)

... After years of corruption born of no-bid contracts and paltry oversight, many Iraqis are still waiting for the lights to come back on. Today, a new team of contractors is lining up to reconstruct the U.S. economy — reconstruct it from the mess made by the very banks, brokers and law firms that are now applying for contracts. And it's not at all clear that America can survive their assistance. ...

... Secretary Paulson promised that the banks won't just "hoard" the money — they will quickly "deploy it" through the economy in the form of badly needed loans. There is just one hitch: Neither Paulson nor [the private company hired to perform the bailout] got that "deploy" part in writing — nor did they put in place any mechanism to require the banks to spend their taxpayer billions. Apparently, the part about lending the money to homeowners and small businesses was sort of implied. ...

... Shortly after receiving the contract [to disburse $700 billion in taxpayer money], [the president of the bank that won the contract] told investors that his institution is now well-positioned to profit from the market meltdown. "There's a lot of new business that's going on even in this chaotic marketplace," he said, "and so some of those things have been very positive to us."...

... On the same day that he allocated the first $125 billion to the banks, Secretary Paulson announced the largest federal budget deficit in U.S. history. Buried in his statement was a preview of the next phase of the financial disaster. The deficit numbers, he declared, reinforce the need to "pursue policies that promote economic growth and fiscal responsibility, and address entitlement reform." He was referring to Americans who feel entitled to receive Social Security in their old age and Medicaid when they are sick. Those programs, Paulson implied, might not be able to survive the budget crisis he is currently creating for the next administration. ...

... [Obama’s] first order of business—and one that cannot wait until inauguration—must be halting the robbery-in-progress known as the “economic bailout.” I have spent the past month examining the loopholes and conflicts of interest embedded in the U.S. Treasury Department’s plans. The results of that research can be found in a just published feature article in Rolling Stone, The Bailout Profiteers, as well as my most recent Nation column, Bush’s Final Pillage.

Both these pieces argue that the $700-billion “rescue plan” should be regarded as the Bush Administration’s final heist. Not only does it transfer billions of dollars of public wealth into the hands of politically connected corporations (a Bush specialty), but it passes on such an enormous debt burden to the next administration that it will make real investments in green infrastructure and universal health care close to impossible. If this final looting is not stopped (and yes, there is still time), we can forget about Obama making good on the more progressive aspects of his campaign platform, let alone the hope that he will offer the country some kind of grand Green New Deal. ... (Go to link above for more.)

About Me

B.S. in Physics, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1960 Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1966. Fellow, American Physical
Society. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fellow, American Ceramic Society. Member, Geological Society of America, Research Physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC,
1967-2001. Fulbright-García Robles Fellow at Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1997. Invited Professor of Research at Universités
de Paris-6 & 7, Lyon-1, et St-Etienne (France) and Tokyo Institute
of Technology, 2000-2004. Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering, University of Arizona, 2004-2005. Consultancy: impactGlass
research international, 2005-present.
Winner, one national and two international research awards and honored
by Brown University with a "Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus
Award." Author, 198 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books, Principal Author of 114 of these.